by Brian Godawa
He reached down and pulled her up by her hair, almost ripping it from her scalp. He lifted her up to his face. She was too dizzy to see straight. She started to pass out. He slapped her back to the present. Her bloody blackened eye was blinded. But she could see him through her other eye clouded with tears.
“The only reason I did not kill you is because you carry my son. Never speak to me that way again, or I shall cut my offspring from your belly and drink your blood as it drains from your body.”
He dropped her to the floor and turned to leave.
A servant staring silently with eyes wide open in fright accosted him.
“What is it?”
“M-my Lord,” said the servant. “You have some visitors.”
“Who?” he barked.
“Traveling hierodules of Ashtart.”
Arba had wondered what in Sheol hierodules of Ashtart would want with him. But he was commissioned by Ashtart in Sodom, so he knew it was not wise to keep her waiting or cross her in any way. He met with them out by his stone palace entrance.
When he arrived, his Naphil sixth sense made him pause. He saw before him small slender hierodules dressed in traveling robes. But he knew they were dangerous. They were tattooed as appropriate for the temple and were as a matter of fact quite attractive. There was something inhuman about them but he could not place it. Their eyes were the only visible giveaway. One had bright ochre irises and small pupils and the other had completely black eyes with no white at all. And then he realized what the second one reminded him of: A peregrine falcon. He was a falconer himself and knew those eyes anywhere.
They were accompanied already by two of Arba’s guards so he thought he would not order more guards for security. It might alarm these strangers. Although they were quite small and manageable, he knew that such disadvantages could afford the element of surprise with secret fighting skills or hidden sorcery.
They bowed and spoke in his tongue, “Your majesty.”
“Please forgive my minimum guard,” he said to the visitors. “It is royal protocol. Please, allow me to entertain you in my chambers.”
The guards led the female visitors to a meeting hall in the stone palace. Once inside the room, Arba noticed how they moved with preternatural grace and elegance. Arba was wondering if they would be willing to perform any cultic sexual congregations with him.
He made a chirping whistle and servants brought out some bread, fruit, and wine.
“You must be tired from your journeys,” said Arba. “You are not from around here?”
The feline one spoke. Her voice was soothing and sensuous.
“My name is Zula, and this is Laliya. We have been commissioned by Ashtart of Sodom to find a rogue individual who may have been in these parts. We request your kind help, good King Arba.”
It made sense to him. Nothing seemed out of place.
“Do you have your commission from Ashtart?” he asked.
“Unfortunately, we do not,” replied Zula. “We were robbed in the Negeb.”
That sounded about right. The Negeb desert was crawling with nomadic Amorites who were notorious for their pirate activities. But for these two beautiful slight women left unscathed? That did not seem right.
The falcon-eyed one interrupted Arba’s inner questioning. She decided to be as bold and frank as possible to spare the doubts.
“We are looking for a man named Abram of Haran. We believe he has a wife named Sarai and a small clan. Our interest is private, but we do provide reward for any help that may lead us to him.”
Her boldness worked. It was the honesty that washed away all the previous questions.
Arba now knew Ashtart did not commission these two women. And he understood why they had been able to travel unmolested in this brutal country, and why his sixth sense of danger alerted him in their presence. But their deception did not bother him anymore, because he knew he was talking to a pair of assassins. And if a pair of assassins was looking for Abram of Haran, then he might finally get what he had been lusting after for too long.
He replied, “Rejoice this day, hierodules. For your search is over. I know the man of whom you speak.”
They looked at each other with their otherworldly eyes.
“And I only ask for one small reward in return.”
Chapter 41
The city of Borsippa was about eleven miles south west of the ruins of Babel. It was a sister city that Nimrod had turned into his new center of rule. Unlike Babel, it did not have protective walls, so when Nimrod received word of Chedorlaomer’s approach with his armies of Elam, he knew he would have to muster every soldier from the surrounding cities of Kish, Akkad, and Sippar, as well as every civilian who had a pitchfork or tree ax to fight for their lives. Without walls to hide behind, they needed large numbers to face the trained armies of Elam.
Nimrod had gathered seven hundred thousand soldiers and civilians in the plains of Shinar to meet Chedorlaomer’s mere five thousand elite warriors. That was fourteen times the number of Elam’s forces, but it would not be as easy as it seemed.
Unfortunately, Nimrod’s armies were not trained, so he knew he would have to pour myriads of souls into the slaughter with the hopes of wearying the king of Elam’s fighting forces with too many to kill. Then Nimrod would ride his small guard of Nephilim into their exhausted ranks and seek to take out the king himself.
Nimrod cared not one whit for the lives of his subjects. He would sacrifice them all in order to achieve victory. He would sacrifice his own family if he could.
It was time for Mardon to experience battle, so he was to lead a unit of the giants into battle as well. Nimrod was hoping that Mardon would be killed in combat, so he could rid himself of his vile miscreant of an offspring. This would jeopardize his other plans for a legacy of destruction, but he would restrategize if that happened.
Mardon had been taught leadership and fighting skills by his father. He had the soulless hardness of heart that would make him capable of handling the horrors of war. But torturing captive victims and beating servants was not the same as facing trained warriors. And for that he carried some anxiety, which is why he commissioned two of his best Nephilim warriors to guard him in the fight.
When Semiramis heard of the impending war, she called Mardon to her private chambers and sought to inspire him in the way she best knew how — sexual depravity.
In the throes of ecstasy, he bit a small piece of her ear off and ate it. When Semiramis slapped him and clutched her bleeding ear in pain, he claimed it as a means of absorbing some of her power into his own for the battle. It was like eating the flesh of deity he said, and they finished their perverse tryst under the hidden watchful eyes of Nimrod’s spy.
As they lay on the sheets catching their breaths, Mardon told her, “The plans are set. I have spoken with my contingent of Gibborim warriors.”
She looked at him with surprise. “They are loyal to you?”
He said, “They are just as dissatisfied with their father and king as we are — as all of Shinar is. They even believe the other Nephilim will join us when we carry it out.”
Semiramis smiled. “We may yet have our day, dear son.”
• • • • •
It was morning when the armies faced each other on the battlefield plains of Babel. Nimrod and Mardon commandeered their two ranks of a hundred giant warriors each at the rear of their seven hundred thousand-man army. They were scattered without formation and suffered the lack of proper combat gear and weapons. They were overworked and underfed from Semiramis’ opulent demands on the king’s treasury. They were rebuilding a kingdom after all.
Before them stood the warriors of Elam led by Chedorlaomer. Five thousand of the best-trained men of the Eastern kingdoms. In the lead were their phalanxes of soldiers with square shields held tightly together and their long spears thrust through openings. It created an impenetrable porcupine type wall used for attacking. Behind them were the regiment of archers carrying the newer developed comp
osite bow made of horn, wood, and metal that would launch arrows twice as far and with twice as much force as the normal bows.
Nimrod saw what was coming. It was going to be a massacre. But he had no other choice.
The horns of war bellowed.
Chedorlaomer raised his sword and the phalanxes began to inch forward. They were in no hurry. But the forces of Nimrod saw the attack and began to rush the field.
Behind the phalanxes, the archers drew their bows, a thousand of them, and released a volley of death from the air upon the advancing soldiers of Shinar. They quickly reloaded and refired, over and over again. It was a thunderstorm of lightning bolts piercing the armies of Nimrod by the thousands. They had to climb over their own dead just to keep advancing.
By the time they met in the field, the phalanxes with their disciplined maneuvers were skewering the random untrained forces like shiskabobs. They pushed them back but then were stopped in their tracks. Nimrod had been right. The dead bodies were too high for the phalanxes to climb without breaking ranks, which would leave them open to attack. So they backed off.
Several hundred thousand had already been killed. Nimrod was right again. It was a massacre. A bloodbath of carnage. But he made the mistake of angrily sallying forth with his soldiers around the heaps of the dead.
Another volley of arrows from Elam filled the sky. Mardon was staying safely behind the field of combat. But he was not safe from the two arrows that pierced his body, one through his liver and the other through his lung, grazing his heart. He fell from his horse and yelled out to his guard, “Go! Now! As we planned!”
The Nephilim guard left him and galloped off toward Nimrod. Mardon cursed the gods and fate through wheezing breaths.
The giant warriors had been commanded by Mardon to kill Nimrod in the course of battle so that Mardon might rise to the throne and end the tyranny. But what they did not count on was that their brothers guarding Nimrod were still loyal. So when the Gibborim conspirators arrived, Nimrod’s Gibborim countered them. It created enough confusion for Nimrod to lose control of the battlefield.
His forces ran into a slaughter. By the time they surrendered, only a hundred thousand were still alive. Six hundred thousand soldiers had been wiped out.
The Nephilim had almost killed one another in the fight over Nimrod, but the survivors were captured along with their king.
The field lay saturated in blood, and the cries of dying soldiers filled the air. The forces of Elam moved in on the city, Nimrod was chained and brought to the prison.
Over in the rear of the Shinarian army, Mardon had passed out. When he came to, he stared up into the sun at the face of a god. It was the mighty warrior Marduk. He leaned down into the blood and mud and stroked Mardon’s hair.
“You are the son of Nimrod,” he said.
Mardon shivered with fear. “Have mercy.”
“Mercy, I am afraid, is not a virtue I hold dear. But you are dying, human. And my plans are not for you, but for your father. I have no further use for you.”
Mardon wondered if Marduk would leave him there to die or crush his skull and get it over with.
Marduk continued with a smirk, “You know, I remember at Babel that you once had a fancy for me. I believe it was a prayer of yours to one day have sex with a god, since you had already had sex with everything from cattle to corpses.”
Mardon was not too fancying at this moment. He was just trying to breathe.
“I think I am going to answer your prayers,” said Marduk.
Marduk then broke off the arrows that were in Mardon, ripped off his clothes with one jerk, and proceeded to violently rape him.
He could feel the life breath leaving Mardon just as he reached his own climax of release. It was a powerful experience with spiritual symbolism for Marduk. The spasm of sexual release unified with the spasm of death. Pure poetry.
He threw the cadaver to the ground and continued on his way.
Semiramis drew her bath with very warm, almost hot, water. She let her naked body down into the water of the ground pool. The steam penetrated her nostrils and the heat warmed the chill of her body. Two servants scrubbed her body lightly with sponges. The water slid down her breasts, onto her belly, and into the water.
She was cleaning herself for her meeting with Chedorlaomer, the conquering king of her city, of her kingdom.
She had always felt she deserved the kingdom far more than Nimrod, who was just a brutish boor trampling everything without discretion. But she had found out that her son Mardon was dead, so she would never see that dream fulfilled. She heard Nimrod was confined in the prison, probably to be dragged through the streets in triumph and hanged from the gallows before the watching world.
Another servant anointed her hair with oil. Some of it ran down her face and stung her bruised eye.
She dismissed her servants and relaxed beneath the cleansing waters.
She had fought so long and so hard to achieve her desire of power, and now she felt like it had all come crashing in on her. It was not fair. She was a woman. She had few advantages in a world of men. She was the useful tool of Nimrod, now she would probably become the useful tool of Chedorlaomer.
She had told herself long ago that she was never going to be the tool of any man again.
She pulled a dagger out of her bag and clutched it with deep sorrow.
She put it to her wrists and cut long way down her veins, slicing them open irreparably.
The blood poured out of her and into the pool in a spreading stain of red.
She became lightheaded, dizzy.
She slipped into unconsciousness and then oblivion below the waters.
She was dead.
She had finally escaped her miserable life.
But would she escape her Maker?
Chapter 42
A long thin plume of reddish smoke drifted up from a bonfire in the center of Kiriath-Arba. The hierodules Zula and Laliya had given Arba some special powder to throw in the fire to create the strange colored smoke. They did it once a day for several days until the other two hierodules, Zakita and Kulla, finally arrived to meet them on the raised plateau.
The four of them were now together and briefed on Abram’s location in the Oaks of Mamre. They planned their scheme that would require complete surprise in order to kidnap Abram without being discovered by the clan.
Arba told them not to worry about the red smoke being a warning to the Amorites. Arba explained that they often did such things in their funerals so Mamre would consider it part of their rituals.
The assassins waited until evening to set out for Mamre.
It was a full moon, the optimum conditions for their feline and avian senses.
They bathed and donned tight fitting dark clothes with their blades stored in scabbards and their bows and arrows on their backs.
They were virtually invisible, stealthy and lethal, and they were ready to capture their prey.
• • • • •
It was harvest time in the five cities of the plain. And that meant it was time for the Festival of the Burning God.
It was the biggest event of the year and it was held in the Valley of Siddim just south of the tar pits. It was a weeklong celebration where everyone was free from their employment to engage in non-stop orgies and a carnival of pleasures. Or a better term might be “circus of freaks,” as the participants would clothe themselves in outrageous costumes. Men would dress as women, women as men, some would parade themselves completely naked through the streets. Others walked about in bizarre wardrobe that defied gender — and good taste. Everything was acceptable, nothing was forbidden.
It was all part of Ashtart’s ongoing attack on El Shaddai by degrading humanity created in his image. Grotesque replaced normal, freakishness replaced beauty, madness replaced reason, vice replaced virtue.
At the end of the festival, a huge effigy of El Shaddai “the unseen god” was built out of wood and pelted with their excrement before being set aflame in
a delirious drug-induced ecstasy courtesy of the city sorcerers. Sometimes they would trap captured El Shaddai followers in the effigy to burn alive.
As Lot walked through the festival, he felt the urge to vomit, it was so repulsive to him. He felt completely ineffectual in his campaign to instill a sense of righteousness in Sodom. He had tried to get citizens to boycott the event because of its wickedness, but to no avail. He had sought to pass laws that would protect traveling merchants from abuse, strangers in need of hospitality, the abandoned and sacrificed infants, and the followers of El Shaddai as victims of oppression, but the judges were all in league with the king and Ashtart. They had ruled that anyone who was not of the progressive Cities of Love and tolerance were to be treated with zero tolerance and deserved to be punished.
And now that progressive tolerance was assaulting his senses as he made his way to the meeting he was to have with the king of Sodom. Copulation pens blanketed the main thoroughfare. Every kind of sexual congress was being engaged in out in the open without walls or privacy. He passed orgies, same sex unions, sex with animals, sex between family members, sex with children, and even sex with inanimate objects.
The stench of refuse filled the air as he came upon a corridor of the arts. Another part of Ashtart’s plan of debasing the image of Elohim in mankind was to inspire an obsession with excrement in their art and sexuality. Urine and feces was celebrated in sculpture, wall and vase paintings, and public theatre in a kind of chic cynicism. As the saying went, “In the end, we are all just excrement.” Sexual partners would bathe in urine, rub their bodies with feces, and excrete on one another as a way of “becoming one” with each other and the earth. They called them “dung orgies.”
When Lot reached the king’s tent he was allowed in by the Nephilim guards at the entrance, and ushered up to the portable throne were sat King Bera of Sodom. He was an obese blob of a man, whose god was his stomach. He must have weighed close to three hundred pounds and had to have everything widened or extended for him: Doorways, chairs, bed, and chariot. He required a half dozen servants just to help him move from throne to chariot to dining table to bed.